


A Little Piece of Heaven

by Zafaria



Category: Wizard101
Genre: Gen, also myrna was marla but then i was like u kno i like that marla kid, hi! sorry!, she'll survive, this is macabre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 00:44:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13260036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zafaria/pseuds/Zafaria
Summary: The student population of Ravenwood is dropping steadily. Even in the bright, fantastic world of Wizard City there is unamenable crime.





	A Little Piece of Heaven

  They say Nightside leads to the bad part of town. Sunken City is beyond that, two damp caves and a world of trouble away. This is the area of Wizard City with the highest crime rates, disproportionately weighing the scale down when compared to quaint Unicorn Way, or stoic Golem Court. 

  
     It got so bad, they put a gate on the entrance to the city. Sometimes, on the way home, the students would slide between the rusting iron bars and run into the shadows ahead of their peers that waited patiently on the guards to grant access to the city.

  
     They don't do that anymore.

  
     Bodies started turning up, in the thickets, by the dried ponds, behind decrepit towers. All of them were young, bright-faced students with clean white teeth and once-lustrous eyes. And there were a lot of them. 

  
     This killer had a type, it seemed. The naive, the foolish, the invincible. One by one, they were picked off, festering and forgotten corpses to be found cold and devoid days later, enduring the unspeakable only detailed in the police files and crime scene photos. Their patch of earth would be cordoned off, the officers brushing samples of common dirt and rummaging through each blade of grass for any murmurings of guidance. Sometimes they were older, skeletal bits that were only found once the officers had learned where to search. The broken mandibles would be marked, with imprints of teeth hurriedly carried off for matching to other records. All the students now did dental profilings with the hopes that they'd never be recalled from a dusty file cabinet shoved in an office corner.

  
     Worst was when the parents were notified. The body would be moved out quickly but they'd waver over the site for hours, sobbing. The other students made appearances, patting shoulders and weeping, handing tokens to the family, always staring with the same bewildered, revolted look. This was their classmate's fate. Soon enough, they thought, it would be another classmate. And then, maybe them. Their sense and warmth quickly fled from their palms, their tender hands and split cuticles trembling at the thought of the darkness and the suffering. 

  
     The whole city wondered if it was the cobbler, or the dyer, or an older student, or parent. Were they a necromancer who became too taken with their craft and the dirty workings of it? With months of murder, exhaustion, tears, all it had amounted to was a specter. They knew the killer was tall, languid in torturing, like it was pleasant. Like it was thrilling.

  
     Marla lived in the haunted city. Her house was grubby, shoved into a corner between two other large two-stories, with its drooping brown roof and worn grey bricks. The pavement in front of the step was uneven and split, with weeds slinking gently between the stones in the pitch-dark earth. The door shut with a loud clunk, and she hurriedly shoved her key into the lock, scrambling to turn the pins and slam the deadbolt into its holster across the door. On particularly scary nights, when the bulging, grey face of her peer was still rank in her mind, or the odor of decomposition saturated the air outside, she would move the splintering table in front of the door and stack heavy books before each leg to keep it in place. The barking of officers and howling winds still floating around outside. Every night, she slipped under no less than three blankets, hiding as much of her form as she could. A corner of the top blanket would flip over her head, signaling the end of another eerie and surreal day.

  
     The next day, when classes started again, students brought their candles and flowers. They began the day with the waning creak of the tired door, creeping into the classroom hours before the lectures would take place. And the morning withered away, evaporated as they taped tear-stained notes of love with bleeding, smudged lettering to an empty desk and lit candles outside the doorway. Someone always had a black drape to throw over the seat. Some of the girls who liked to decorate for all the school festivals brought their most ornate ribbon, their fingers deftly wrapping knot after knot to create a funerary bow.

  
     Under the tables, hands reached out to each other, clutching desperately, unwilling to let go of another soul. The professor would start talking about the student, eulogizing them. As the first words came from their morose lips, the students eyelids would fall, distress wrinkled into their faces. Marla shoved her face into her sleeve, stingingly aware of each individual thread as they indented and scraped into the spots under her eyes. No questions were asked about the lesson, no words exchanged during lunch.

  
     Arms linked, the group clambered off in the direction of Olde Town, afraid of returning to their home, where they no longer felt comfort or security. Buried deep in the mazes of shops, they shed their weighty emotions and tried to restore themselves. Their eyes hungrily absorbed anything bright and escaping. Marla stared into a brilliant yellow robe, her mind blank and eyes sore. She had no intentions to purchase, she just wavered in front of the garment, staring past it.

  
     Every day would go by like this, and they promised to travel in packs, work on homework together in the upper floors of the library, and cry on each other's shoulders in the gaps behind the storefronts in the Shopping District. This was always the promise, but somewhere down the line, it would be broken, again and again. Snapped the same way the bodies' neck were, tangled like the cords wrapped around their throats.

     The pact with Marla was broken. When she stopped gazing at the robe she saw the pack of students had moved on and the sun was sinking.

     Marla made the walk home by herself. She put her airs on and made a show of her prominent, unafflicted strides, elbows pointedly stuck out to her sides so her gait would engulf the sidewalk. But her eyes couldn’t peel from the walkway. They watched the toe of her boots break into her vision underneath her, the sidewalk ten feet before her a mystery. She was tense enough that the rustling leaves and creaking vines caught a darting glance. Her eyes scoured the area looking for fragments of a lurking murderer that never cemented into an actual being.

     Footsteps approached behind her, quick and light.

     “Hey, hey! Wait up, I don’t want to walk alone either!” Behind her was a boy in a verdant green outfit, crisp and pressed. His eyes held unnamable terror. She thought she maybe recognized him and his starry outfit from the back corner of the Life Classroom.

    “Yes! No problem, please do walk with me.” She responded back. Desperation coated her words, but it was okay. All the students were scared. There was no point in hiding it now. They walked past the crammed buildings together, careful not to step on cracks in the cobbles and to keep pace with the other’s anxiety-laden feet.

    “Here, this way. It’s a shortcut. We’ll get to the center of town a lot faster,” the boy waved in the direction of an alley. For a long stretch, it was dark, but the glow of the break in the buildings at the other end was visible. Just a few minutes away if they sprinted.

     Marla was aching to get off the exposed and deserted streets.

     “Yeah, yeah. Let’s sprint,” she said.

     “Sure thing!”

     They started off down the alley, their feet bouncing off the ground and their hearts ready to burst from their chests. And then a foot wrapped around in front of Marla and tripped her. She fell forward, bruising the palms of her quaking hands and smacking her chin.

     “What the hell? Is that funny for you?” She yelled at the boy.

     “Every time! Wanna see a magic trick?” He smiled at her. His grin struck her with a stabbing realization in her boggled mind that this was the monster. It was echoed when he unsheathed his curved blade, ready to indulge once again.

     There was a scream stifled in her narrowing throat. She never got another word out.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi. For context, this was based off a one-word ask prompt on my tumblr, and someone sent in "Quiet".  
> I like true crime, sometimes. I lived this kind of serial-crime-riddled, teen-targeted nightmare last year in school and it was horrifying, so I suppose this is the logical end of all those feelings, and letting go.


End file.
